MOZART Complete Flute Quartets

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Genre:

Chamber

Label: Alpha

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 57

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: ALPHA204

ALPHA204. MOZART Complete Flute Quartets

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Flute Quartet Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
Juliette Hurel, Flute
Quatuor Voce
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Composer
‘Three small, easy and brief concertinos and a couple of quartets for the flute’ is how Mozart described the commission from Ferdinand Dejean. The pieces were K285 and K285a; K285b and K298 were written separately. The authorship of K285b has been questioned, and for Henrik Wiese, editor of the Henle Edition, Mozart in K298 ‘makes use of various themes by minor contemporary composers cobbling them into a parodistic quartet’.

Juliette Hurel is an excellent flautist, warm and clean of tone, but a musician whose insight is often circumscribed by emotional reticence. The strings tend to follow her lead, and a jointly impersonal view of K285 sets the ball rolling. Bland playing glosses over the modulation to A minor in the development of the first movement and although the rhythm of the finale is good, the dynamic range is narrow. Most affected is the B minor Adagio. Hurel & Co are a touch prosaic, leaving Emanuel Pahud to reveal the poetry of this profound slow movement. Interpretative constraints similar to those in K285 are heard in other quartets too, the exception being K 285b. It’s a shining exception, of artists stepping out of templates, taking personal responsibility to go beyond the notes to find the moods, colour and potency inherent in the music – which Michala Petri (recorders) does in all four works.

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